The news that the inventor of the modern email, Ray Tomlinson, passed away last Saturday made many of us think how did the way of our online inboxes begin.
While numerous emails fill our inboxes on a daily basis, few of us are familiar with the history of the email invention. And actually Tomilson was not the real inventor of the electronic message, but the programmer who, in 1971, was the first to literally put the “@” symbol in an e-message.
The very first version of what would become known as email was firstly tested 6 years ahead of that, in 1965, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when through the university’s Time-Sharing Systems, users from remote terminals managed to share files and messages on one central disk.
In the following years, the practice was used by many companies, especially in the US, enabling employees on different terminal, connected to a central system, to exchange messages though it. To later, when the central systems of different branches were connected, enabling employees to exchange emails crossing out the local Intranet- along with geographical- boundaries.
Yet there were still many boundaries present and sending a message to a specific person at a specific address was not possible.
Email – History
In 1971, Tomlinson succeeded in sending out the first person-to-person email on the ARPANET system (the forerunner to the modern global Internet, created by the US Government). He used the symbol “@” to connect the username with the destination address and the modern email was born.
The first email standard was proposed in 1973 at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and finalised in 1977, introducing the “@” sign to allow messages to be targeted at certain users on certain machines, along with numerous options of the modern email, like the “to” and “from” fields, along with the forwarding one.
By the mid 80s, emails were been exchanged through the ARPANET with common email users been students and academic stuff, along with government and military employees.
It is believed, that Queen Elizabeth II was the first head of state to ever send an email on ARPANET, which she did in 1976.
And in 1991, with the creation of the World Wide Web, almost all boundaries fell down to find us today with inboxes full of thousand of unread and spam emails.
As the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic transmission of a document, including faxing, it is difficult to determine the first ever written citation for the use of email.
Yet the term E-mail, as such, firstly appeared in print in 1975 when the New York Electronics magazine wrote that: “Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail.”
The common term e-mail message firstly appeared in print in 1984 in The American banker magazine: “They can check their portfolios, download research, and send E-mail messages to their account executives.”
The same year saw the first record of the phrase email address, used at Usenet newsgroup: “Please fill out the following form, between the dotted lines, and send via email to me at the address at the bottom. In giving your email address, give it relative to a well-known site.”
The use of the term email account was firstly recorded in 1985, in UNIX Review to nowadays, when the total number of email accounts worldwide is expected to reach over 4.3billion accounts by the end of 2016 and which accounts would be sending and receiving an estimation of nearly 250 billion emails per day.
